Sunday, July 1, 2012

T. S. Eliot: the invention of a poetic self and voice

Thanks to Christopher Ricks (Inventions of The March Hare, Poems 1909-1917), we can now read the unpublished poems that preceded Preludes, The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, and the other poems that appeared for the first time in Eliot's first book, Prufrock And Other Observations (1917). [Not 'poems', mind you, but the ironic "observations": Eliot's first readers could not say that they had not been warned.]

Eliot was interested, from the first, in trying to see what he could make of the urban landscape—not romanticized (or etherealized) as in Wordsworth's early morning view of London from West-
Minster Bridge— but presented, shoved in front of us, in all its ugly reality. I will show you several of these "caprices" as Eliot calls some of them (a musical term like 'preludes').

First Caprice in North Cambridge

A street-piano, garrulous and frail;The yellow evening flung against the panesOf dirty windows: and the distant strainsOf children's voices, ended in a wail.

Bottles and broken glass,Trampled mud and grass;A heap of broken barrows;And a crowd of tattered sparrowsDelve in the gutter with sordid patience.

Oh, these minor considerations! . . . . .

Second Caprice in North Cambridge

This charm of vacant lots!The helpless fields that lieSinister, sterile and blind—Entreat the eye and rack the mind,Demand your pity.With ashes and tins in piles,Shattered bricks and tilesAnd the debris of a city.

Far from our definitionsAnd our esthetic lawsLet us pauseWith these fields that hold and rack the brain(What: again?)With an unexpected charmAnd an unexplained reposeOn an evening in DecemberUnder a sunset yellow and rose.

Interlude In London

We hibernate among the bricksAnd live across the window panesWith marmalade and tea at sixIndifferent to what the wind doesIndifferent to sudden rainsSoftening last years garden plots

And apathetic, with cigarsCareless, while down the street the spring goesInspiring mouldy flowerpots,And broken flutes at garret windows.

Silence

Along the city streets,It is still high tide,Yet the garrulous waves of lifeShrink and divideWith a thousand incidentsVexed and debated:—This is the hour for which we waited—

This is the ultimate hourWhen life is justified.The seas of experienceThat were so broad and deep,So immediate and steep,Are suddenly still.You may say what you will,At such peace I am terrified.There is nothing else beside.

Pretty good for a 20 or 21 year-old kid, we might say. When we read the poem that these poems were working towards, however, we can see why Eliot might have wanted to make sure that they would never be published. The poem that Eliot really wanted to write is Preludes, a poem that not only anticipates The Wasteland but in my (minority) opinion is superior to it—and less pretentious.

IIThe morning comes to consciousnessOf faint stale smells of beerFrom the sawdust-trampled streetWith all its muddy feet that pressTo early coffee-stands.

With the other masqueradesThat time resumes,One thinks of all the handsThat are raising dingy shadesIn a thousand furnished rooms.

IIIYou tossed the blanket from the bed,You lay upon your back and waited;You dozed, and watched the night revealingThe thousand sordid images;Of which your soul was constitutedThey flickered against the ceiling.And when all the world came backAnd the light crept up between the shuttersAnd you heard the sparrows in the gutters,You had such a vision of the streetAs the street hardly understands;Sitting along the bed's edge, whereYou curled the papers from your hair,Or clasped the yellow soles of feetIn the palms of both soiled hands.

IVHis soul stretched across the skiesThat fade behind a city block,Or trampled by insistent feetAt four and five and six o'clock;And short square fingers stuffing pipes,And evening newspapers, and eyesAssured of certain certainties,The conscience of a blackened streetImpatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curledAround these images and cling:The notion of some infinitely gentleInfinitely suffering thing.

Eliot wrote a small number of great poems, but never anything greater than this. Prufrock, which seems to have been written before Preludes, is wonderful for the way it uses the urban materials and insights of the former poem for comic rather than tragic effect. The world of Prufrock is neither as desperate or as sad as that other poem had brilliantly forced us to see it. Did it ever occur to Eliot when he came to write The Wasteland that he had already written it?—but without the pompous notes, shallow anthropology and—most of all (from my point of view) the Christian allegorizing.

Many of the poems that Eliot published in 1917 and 1920 strike me (and not only me, I suppose) as either trivial ("Aunt Helen" or "Cousin Nancy" for example) or pursuing some mostly private symbolism, as in the Sweeney poems, or "Whispers of Immortality." The mystery is, how such a private, deliberately obscure, writer of a handful of poems could have become, so widely acclaimed as a great poet? (A similar question could be asked about Wallace Stevens.)

Here are some poem that, in addition to Preludes and Prufrock some poems that I keep coming back to: two poems about heartlessness: Portrait of A Lady and La Figlia che Piange.

I also like Rhapsody on a Windy Night, which seems to be about another kind of failure—the failure, perhaps, of someone from the world described in Preludes—to escapeor even to change his or her desperately regimented and impoverished life; that person might even be Prufrock himself. I also like Marina and Burnt Norton (probably—in the case of the latter poem— because of that Rose Garden full of children which the poet can never recover.)

It may, I know, be very old fashioned, even a trifle vulgar, to like poems that make connections between art and life. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.

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One of my readers asks me if the anti-semitic attitude that we find in such a poem as "Burbank With a Baedeker: Bleistein With a Cigar" could be implicit in Eliot's Christianity. Obviously the answer is yes—antisemitism was certainly an integral part of European Christianity in the 1920's and 30's—especially in Germany. I couldn't print this question because a spammer had somehow got hold of it and had hitched a ride on it.

About Me

I'm a scholar by profession who learned, too late, that the world really does not need another paltry book about Shakespeare. What else is there to say? Except, as another, much greater scholar once said, "Sir, my history will not be long: the life that is devoted to knowledge passes silently away and is very little diversified by events. To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He wanders about the world without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor valued but by men like himself."
I was educated at Amherst College (1949-53) where I studied philosophy, mathematics, and literature, and at Harvard University where I earned a Ph.D in English Literature in 1964. I studied at Cambridge University on a Fulbright (1954-55), served in the U.S. Army (1955-57), taught (from 1962 to 1999, when I retired) at Wellesley College, Bemidji State University, Metropolitan State University, Hebei University (PRC). I have been married, happily, to Katherine Greene Lewis since 1960. We have four children.